Tokyo Design Week 2013: Events Preview

Autumn is artistic! October is one of the busiest in Tokyo’s art and design events calendar. The city may at times just seem like a monotonous gray concrete jungle but every year in the fall, art and design arrive to brighten things up. No doubt many readers want to get a grip on all the manifold events taking place in Tokyo over the coming weeks. Many of them offer chances to get an insider’s glimpse into the latest developments in the industry.

Here’s PingMag’s round-up of the main events taking place in and around Tokyo’s “design week”.

Art/Design

If you apply, you can exhibit. This is the spirit of the Chiyoda Arts Festival, and as such there are over 200 items in the main venue. While touring the renovated former junior high school, be sure also to check out the rooftop market on October 12th and 13th.

This event sets out to be a chance to “enjoy design with all five senses”. Occupying the whole of Tokyo Midtown in Roppongi, it is packed with events and things where you can touch with design. There are also workshops at weekends where you can make kokedama (green moss bonsai) and Japanese bookbinding.

For girls, by girls. This event sees all manner of female designers getting together to show off their wares. Not only in the main venue at the Parco Museum, you will also be able to find exhibits inside the department store’s corridors and even on the outside walls.

To think of Kanda or Jimbocho is to think of second-hand books. The area has 176 used book shops, making it perhaps the biggest of its kind in the world. There are over 1 million books on sale at this event! The place to pick up your autumnal reading.

October 26th to November 4th @Jimbocho Sanseido Bookstore, others

School Festivals

Autumn also means school festivals! And these present opportunities to witness the Next Big Things before they get famous. Plus the student atmosphere and cheap eats are also fun. Here are some of the events at major art colleges around Tokyo.

November 2nd to November 4th @Nihon University College of Art Ekoda campus

Also check out our earlier summer round-up of arts and music festivals in Japan, which included events that will be happening later this year or are still going on now. The PingMag team will also be taking in Tokyo Designers Week and the other satellite events in the city so look out for our reports coming soon!